Chiff and Fipple Forums

Just curious if you other free reeders can explain this one to me?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Unknown-Music ... _500wt_922

It looks like a mouth-blown flutina. Similar to a Hohnerette, and a precursor to the melodica or accordina.



It would play like a harmonica with blow/draw each giving a note - though whether the same note (unisonoric) or different notes (bisonoric) is hard to tell from looking at the reed lengths. I'm guessing bisonoric like a flutina, since the bass/chord spoons on the left suggest that.

Wiki says:

At that time [1829] in Vienna, mouth harmonicas with Kanzellen (chambers) had already been available for many years, along with bigger instruments driven by hand bellows. The diatonic key arrangement was also already in use on mouth-blown instruments.

Here is another similar instrument with the mouthpiece intact:



Click the pix for links to the respective pages.

Makes sense now that I see where the place to blow may have been.
i was looking at the bell and thinking how do you blow into that.
I assumed it was like a flutina/melodica/accordina type thing.